Our company recently launched a new social network people search tool. And because we wanted to know how well our search tool compares to others, we spent some time comparing them. Here is our evaluation of the Best People Search Tool…
For our evaluation we looked at 123People, Whoozy (same as Wieowie in Holland), Pipl, and our own Sociotoco Profiles. (We know there are several more, but in our experience these are the best tools for finding people on social networks.)
A summary of the results:
Our results show that Sociotoco Profiles (available as a client and as API) is the best people search tool. Yep, it’s true. That’s us. :-) Our tool not only supports the most social networks. It also finds the most profiles within those networks. It probably doesn’t surprise you that we’re happy with these results! :)
We don’t want you to think that we’ve somehow faked the results, or intentionally distorted them, so we hereby give you an explanation of how we got these results. Feel free to contact us if you have questions or doubts about our approach!
Supported networks
We selected a sample of the 20 most popular social networks based on a first pass across all the tools. (We had to do this because of time constraints.) These 20 networks are the ones that resulted in the most profiles in various search results.
It appeared that 123People and Pipl only support 10 of these 20 popular networks, while Woozy supports 14 of them and Sociotoco Profiles came out on top with 17 supported networks in this sample.
The social networks that we evaluated were: Blogger, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, FriendFeed, Google Profiles, Hyves, Last.fm, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Plaxo, Posterous, SlideShare, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Windows Live, Xing, YouTube.
(Note: We ignored sites like Amazon and ZoomInfo because they are not real social networks. We also ignored small networks like TripIt and TypePad because their number of profiles was too small to be useful for a search comparison.)
Profiles found in total networks
We created a sample of 16 random names from colleagues, contacts, and celebrities. For each tool we checked how many profiles we found for these 16 people. We did our test searches twice with each tool (on June 21 and June 28), because the search results tend to differ from day to day. And we wanted to compensate for temporary network glitches.
It appeared that 123People could only find 39% of all the social profiles (that we knew about) across all 20 networks. Pipl found 49% and Whoozy found 61%. Sociotoco Profiles came out on top: it found 81% of the profiles across all social networks.
Profiles found in supported networks
When we limit our evaluation to only the social networks that the tools actually support, the numbers are slightly different, but the pattern is the same: In the 10 networks supported by 123People it could find only 58% of people’s social profiles. Pipl scored substantially better: 73%. In the 14 networks supported by Whoozy it could find 78% of people’s profiles. And again Sociotoco Profiles came out on top: in the 17 networks that it supports, it could find no less than 88% of people’s profiles.
(Or in other words: 123People couldn’t find 42% of the profiles that the other tools did find. While Sociotoco couldn’t find 12% of the profiles that the other tools found. The other two scored in between.)
Conclusion
The conclusion is clear enough: Sociotoco Profiles is the best people search tool. It not only supports the most networks. It also finds the most profiles within those networks!
Raw data
We’ve included our results below, so you can check them for yourself…
Profiles found with 123People:
Profiles found with Whoozy:
Profiles found with Pipl:
Profiles found with Sociotoco Profiles:
p.s. We have a simple people search API available for other developers. You can use it to find social profiles in your application.
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